“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past Ray. It reminds us of all that was once good and it could be again” said James Earl Jones in the role of Terrance Man from the film Field of Dreams.
It’s been a pretty common quote throughout the baseball world, because it has a deeper meaning as to the history of America itself. When World War I was going on, the White Sox won the World Series. When the Great Depression hit the streets, Lou Gehrig, Mel Ott, and Jimmie Foxx ruled baseball. While the Cold War was beginning its height in 1951, Bobby Thompson hit the “Shot heard around the World” to walk off the Dodgers. Every major event throughout the history of the United States has been time stamped with great baseball players, moments, and historic franchises.
Although some people seem to forget its importance, its historic significance, and its impact on the world today. What started out as a fun game to play after school or work, became a worldwide industry that gives kids opportunities to play the greatest game man has produced. However people seem to lose that vision, seeing the money side of it, the business aspect, rather than a sport that shapes a kid into a man.
In fact, it was so crucial and life changing to people, that parents took their deaf and autistic children to meet Babe Ruth to see if he could cure their issues. From people crowding the streets to watch Willie Mays play stickball with kids, to people sitting down in New York to watch a manually changing scoreboard of a game taking place in California. This game had such an importance that if you didn’t know baseball back in the day, you would be considered crazy.
Baseball players during WWII times would leave the sport to go defend their country. Take Ted Williams for example, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, took three years off to go join the military, then the very next year won the MVP. Our own sport, our own athletes defending the flag. It’s crazy to think that now with how much baseball has changed.
We seem to have lost the love for the game in some cases. Guys choosing to go to the team that pays them the most rather than the team they would fit the most in with. MLB has turned to networks, subscriptions, and apps that make you pay fortunes just to watch a game, and even the tickets to go watch a game has made such an upwards in price, that it makes it hard to enjoy the game. So, what happened? Why have they reverted to a business approach? This is a game after all. Where’s the spark? The passion? The drive to play one of the hardest sports in the world? It all boils down to how kids have grown up knowing the game, and the situations their parents create for them.
Parents putting kids onto teams that cost thousands of dollars, the coaches of those programs running practices, not coaching, just running practices. To then put them in tournaments where they don’t face any good competition, and get plastic rings for the price of what? Enjoying the game? They are already putting it into the heads of these kids that they can get away with playing baseball by using money.
Here in the city of Arlington, a well known travel ball team named Stilly Venom has been a huge name in the pacific northwest. However they don’t pull athletes from Spokane, Sedro Wooley, and Stanwood to put an All-Star team together. They are a home grown local team that uses chemistry and real coaching to play the game, not dollars. In 2023, a 14U Venom team put together a Babe Ruth League squad that was full of players who had known each other for a long time.
These parents weren’t paid to have kids on that team, and also weren’t paying thousands and thousands of dollars to put them on the team. They had a coach who knew more about the game than anyone in the state, and even players who play on the High school team today. That team proved everybody wrong in the Snohomish area who doubted them. How could a homegrown, feeder program, with dads as coaches and players who were overlooked, become just another .500 team?
Until they got 2nd in the state and qualified for regionals. Beat the team who hosted the Regional tournament, to then qualify for the Babe Ruth League World Series in Virginia. That’s when the town took notice. A group of guys who knew each other for so long, loved the game like nothing else, and went to war together fighting for wins. They revamped the true meaning of baseball, and people took notice.
A framed picture of them stands in the Arlington Hardware store to this date. They were featured on Root Sports where the Mariner game coverages used to be on. There’s even a picture of this team in Hubbs Pizza & Pasta restaurant. They got 2nd place in the World Series only losing by one run. That team, that program, that coach, all of it became the focal point of Arlington select baseball, because it made people realize that the game has more to it than paying to play on showcase big time teams.
You see, this game is magical. You ask anyone who used to play the game and isn’t able to anymore, they tell you all the good things that happened, and it’s almost like the bad things didn’t exist. The strikeouts, errors, and caught stealing never occurred because the happiness that being perfect for a split second in this sport, doesn’t compare to anything in this lifetime. Going 0 for 4 with four strikeouts, struggling in the field, not being able to comprehend why you are playing the way you are, to becoming the hero in the final inning, final out, of the final pitch. Getting bull rushed by your team after a walk off win, or the helmet barrage walking into the dugout after a big homerun. Nobody can duplicate the way that feels.
Baseball has a way of coming around, of humbling you, putting you down all the way to the point where you feel as if you will quit, then bringing you right back up again. Same with other aspects of this society as well. You go to college trying to become a doctor, see all the different classes, see the loads and loads of work that seem so difficult that you just can’t do it.
In the wise words of Frank Sinatara, “That’s life”. You keep trying, keep grinding, studying, and still fail numerous times. The ones who keep trying after they have failed are the ones who make it far in baseball, and are the ones who make it far in life. In relationships, you hit a stand still of whether or not you can follow through with the person you love so much. You try and try to be better, and still fail sometimes, and maybe so bad that a partner leaves you. It’s the ones that keep improving, keep working, and keep trying to do the right thing even after they have failed, that makes them succeed in life.
That’s baseball. You can do everything correctly, hit 1,000 baseballs, throw 1,000 pitches, and still play badly. They give up, and they take the easy route of living life to the bare minimum. Or they go into the next day and keep hitting, keep throwing, keep fielding, and stay optimistic for the next game.
When Hank Aaron hit his 714th home run to surpass Babe Ruth in all time home runs, the day before that he went 0 for 3. If he would have let that bother him, he wouldn’t have immortalized himself as the game’s best home run hitter at the time. If these people let things bother them, get in their heads and quit, they never amount to anything. Baseball not only has been a game to play because it is fun and exhilarating, but because it teaches us life lessons that people need to be successful in their lifetime.
There’s a famous saying from Babe Ruth, “Don’t let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game”. In other words don’t let the fear of failure keep you from doing what you love. That’s the importance of baseball in this country, in this world, and in the history of man.
The fact is, everyone should get a chance to play baseball, and I hope they fail. I hope they hit an all time low, I hope they feel so miserable that they want to quit. Then they feel it. The perfect throw to gun a runner down from the outfield, a sweet spot hit over the wall, a curve ball that moves so much that it freezes the batter. That is what brings it all together. Trying to be perfect, in an imperfect game. Just like trying to be perfect in an imperfect world.
If there could be just one take away from this is that baseball is changing so much, not in a good way. As we live in a world where money has almost seemed to find its way into every single possible aspect of our lives, that baseball has turned into a game where it seems players don’t care. They jog to first, strikeout like its normal, and receive Tommy John surgery at earlier and earlier stages of life. All they care to get out of it is the paycheck.
There is so much more to all sports now then just the pay, and especially the game America built. If there is a kid reading this, wanting to find ways to enjoy the game even after they struggle and have a tough time, I would say first to get over it. Life’s too short to be worried about doing something wrong, just like a baseball game. Also to love every second of it. Take a glove and put it to your face, take a bat and give it a big sniff, grab the dirt and feel it in your hand, and when you play the game, play it like you are the best ever. You will learn to use that in your everyday well being, and lead a happy life. That’s what baseball is all about in the end, a way for man to feel like a kid, and kid to feel like a man.
